What does a man become when divorced from possessions?
As Peter McGraw prepares to leave Denver for Bogotá, I discover that getting rid of stuff is the easy part. The harder part is confronting the scarcity, control, and old identity hiding inside it. This Solo Thoughts episode about decluttering, departure, and the difference between managing a move and actually making a transition. Onwards!
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Listen to Episode #272 here
Solo Thoughts 20: The Things You Own…
Solo Thoughts 20: The Things You Own. What does a man become when divorced from possessions? Welcome back. By the time you hear this, I will have put my things in storage, packed a carry-on and a couple of checked bags, shipped a few boxes, and arrived in Bogota, Colombia, which will serve as a home base for a sabbatical in South America.
A fresh start in the Andes. A lighter life, thinking, reading, writing, walking, and boxing, figuring out if I have another big idea in me. I would be turning the dial from A life toward more B life, as I talked about in Solo Thoughts 19, striving for a balance of production and presence, optimizing and living, and living more beautifully. Here’s what’s happening.
I’m taping as I pack. I’m spending too much time doing too much preparation, too much optimization, and too much comparison shopping, time I could have spent walking, reading, writing, and boxing. Instead, I’m optimizing cardboard. These are old habits, and frankly, a superpower of sorts. It’s not a surprise that the old operating system was rebooted. Once you start treating a problem like a system to be solved, everything becomes a variable.
The storage unit isn’t just a storage unit. It’s a price per square foot calculation. The donation pile isn’t a pile. It’s a tax deduction to be documented. The shipping boxes aren’t boxes. They’re a geometry problem. Every decision branches into three more decisions. Before I knew it, I’d spent my entire morning on logistics rather than actual life.
I’ve been working on not being like this. Less rumination, more abundance. Less planning, more presence. More reading for pleasure, boxing for flow, a manual typewriter for writing things I never intend to publish. Walks without a destination, and so on. It’s been unsettling, but I’ve made some progress then I started packing.
The Hidden Cost Of Administration
There’s a line in the movie Fight Club. Tyler Durden says, “The things you own end up owning you.” It’s a cliché, but if you’re not careful, it’s dangerously true. I want to complicate it, though. The ownership problem isn’t just about attachment. It’s also about administration. Every object you own is a tiny open loop. It needs to be stored, maintained, cleaned, moved, insured, or decided about. Each one carries a micro decision, and decisions are the most expensive currency I have.
When I look around my apartment, I don’t always see things I love. I see hundreds of small claims in my attention. An ice cream maker that I don’t use often enough, though my waistline appreciates it, collecting dust. Books I’ve already read, art that doesn’t inspire me, boxes of wires, and boxes of lotions. At least they’re in separate boxes, but I have them in case.
There’s the fiddle fig plant. It’s fake. It’s plastic. I bought it to take up a corner space in my living room and soften my mid-century aesthetic of wood and metal. It’s been sitting in that corner for years collecting dust, doing nothing. It’s not alive. It doesn’t produce oxygen. Maybe even the aging plastic might be hurting the atmosphere.
It certainly doesn’t grow. It’s a plastic plant that I have to decide what I do with it. Store it? No thanks. Donate a fake plant? Who wants a used fake plant? Throw it away? That’s wasteful. A $40-something piece of plastic that I bought to impress no one is eating fifteen minutes of my decision-making capacity. Multiply that by everything in an apartment, and you can understand why I’ve been spending my days, and sometimes ruminating in the middle of the night, on logistics instead of living.
I’m shocked by how much I’ve accumulated since my last sabbatical. Time flies. Apparently, it fills closets while it does so. When I look at it all, honestly, very little of it matters. My turntable and vinyl, yes. The typewriter, yes. Some of the art and the clothes that look good and fit well. Maybe 10% of what I own has any real significance. The rest is accumulated. They’re not always curated and not always chosen, but defaulted into. If I have a problem, buy something to solve it.
When you own a lot of stuff, it owns a lot of you. Yet, ironically and paradoxically, the happiest stretches of my life, the times I felt most alive, most free, and most like myself, were often times that I owned almost nothing. In my first year of college, when everything I had fit into a dorm room, none of it mattered because the world was so new and exciting.
A semester at sea, living out of a couple of bags on a ship. My adventures through Asia, Europe, and South America. Everything I need in a carry-on and a backpack. It didn’t feel like a hardship. It felt like liberation. I didn’t think about stuff because there was no stuff to think about. My attention was fully available on the experience. Here’s the irony. Despite my full apartment, I want to decumulate. I want to be someone who doesn’t have a lot of stuff.
Decumulation And Nervous System Alarm
That’s the point of this move. Yet, getting rid of everything activated every scarcity circuit I have. That’s because decumulation feels liberating in theory and mortal in practice. Your nervous system can’t immediately tell the difference between, “I’m reducing excess,” and, “I’m becoming vulnerable.” As an aside, I’m shocked by the number of redundancies that I have in my stuff, a 2nd or 3rd for when things wear out because it was on sale or I might run out.
To own less by force is deprivation. To own less by choice is aristocratic. There’s a strange inversion. People who genuinely want freedom from their possessions become temporarily more obsessed with their possessions during the transition. That’s me. Every object demands a little metaphysical trial. “Keep store.” Future utility? Identity? Regret probability? The mind turns into a customs officer, inspecting every item at the border between an old life and a new one.
I’m not just clinging to stuff. I’m doing a pretty good job getting rid of things. I have been negotiating with my nervous system about whether letting go meant freedom or exposure. Here’s to me being more aristocratic. This episode isn’t about stuff, is it? Stuff is the occasion. The real subject is what happens to your old identity under stress.
I’ve been talking on the show about my struggles with vigilance, anxiety, and scarcity. You’ve heard me work through it. Nocturnal panic attacks, a broken hand, Budapest realizations, a slow shift towards an abundant mindset. I believe I’ve made genuine progress, but progress isn’t the same as transformation. Under enough stress and under enough logistical load, the old operating system boots right back up. It’s not because of failure, but because the wiring is so deep.
I’ve been lumbering towards the realization, the one that I’m having about my stuff, for a while. A few years ago, I was sick. A virus knocked me flat. Since I was already homebound, for some reason, I took some mushrooms. I wrote a poem about what happened that I call The Purge. The poem is about what happens when illness strips away your routines and your defenses, and you’re left staring at your life without the usual distractions.
I wrote about it looking at my website and feeling embarrassed about selling myself cheaply. The second half of the poem is about a second purge, a physical one, surveying my space and feeling the scarcity spell cast. Fear disguised as preparation. I spent two days tearing through closets, shelves, and drawers, tossing, giving, and clearing. Every item that I took away took a little bit of panic with it.
The last line of the poem is the line that opened this episode. What does a man become when divorced from possessions? I’ll read the whole thing at the end, but I’m glad I got a head start. These old patterns are sneaky. You think you’ve made the shift, and then a stressor comes along, such as a move, a deadline, or uncertainty. Here you go again. It says, “I’m not the old pattern. I’m being responsible. I’m helping you out.”
Old Identity Hiding In Responsible Habits
Before you know it, you’re back into the old system. Same machine, different project. That’s what is going on, not just with me, but with a lot of people who are trying to make a change. The old identity doesn’t announce itself. It hides irresponsible behavior. It finds a legitimate task, which could be that move, tax returns, or home renovation, and colonizes it. If you’re not careful, you become that person you were trying to help grow.
I’ve been treating my departure from Denver like I treat a research paper. Optimize, sequence, and execute. I’m good at this. That’s the trap. An identity built on solving problems. The move becomes irresistible and a big problem to solve. It feels productive, and I feel like I’m in control. For me, control was that old pattern’s favorite drug. Every time I crossed something off that to-do list, I got a hit. What am I avoiding? Is it that I’m pursuing productivity, or am I avoiding some nostalgia or some grief?
That’s what happens when you leave a city of aversion to yourself. Emotions don’t fit on a to-do list. I’m asking myself and asking you, what would a different kind of move look like? I still have some time. Some logistics are real. Health insurance doesn’t sort itself out. A visa requires paperwork. Address changes still matter. There is a difference between handling the necessary things and turning my entire life into an optimization department.
Managing Logistics Versus Honoring Transition
Beyond the necessary, there are two ways to leave the place. As a logistical problem, minimize waste and maximize efficiency. Departure is a supply chain. Maybe I should treat it like a transition, a liminal space. I should walk through my apartment slowly, notice how I feel, and use that as a guide. I had some people over for one last time. A house cooling party, where rather than receiving things for the apartment, I gave them away. Booze, books, and anything else that I didn’t want. It was fun and cool to see how people were excited for my new adventure and that we were going to miss each other.
For a transition, taking my favorite Denver walks on purpose. Not for the steps, but to say goodbye to a place that held space for an important chapter of my life. Go to some of my favorite coffee shops one last time before I go. Putting on a record, the whole record, Side A and then Side B, sitting in the apartment while it’s still mine, and enjoying the view. Say thanks to the boxing gym and a big thanks to the mountains.
The Modern Replacement Test For Ownership
The practical stuff pays for ease. Donate instead of sell. Throw away instead of deliberate. If I need to overpay for storage to buy back some time, fine. Don’t donate an hour of a life to squeeze another dollar out of a transaction. One decision that has helped me cut through the noise is that I can ask about an object, like, “Would I buy this today?” not, “Is this still useful?” or, “Might I need it?” It is, “Would I walk right into a store and spend money on this?” If the answer is no, it’s probably going to go.
It’s cognitively taxing, and I might have to rebuy a few things when I come back, but at least I’ll be excited about them. It’s a good cost to pay now than in the future by storing it, hauling it around, and then still not being satisfied by it. Kicking the can down the road means the can is waiting in a storage unit, charging me monthly for the privilege of avoiding the decision. There’s a balance here. Be responsible, but live life.
Bridging The Gap Between Knowing and Living
Here’s the part that’s hard to say on a show about building a remarkable life. I’m struggling with this. I know the right answers. I’ve known them for a long time. I’ve said it, I’ve written it, and I’ve put it into a framework. Yet, 45 minutes go by, working on a storage unit decision. Knowing the answer and living the answer are separated sometimes by a canyon, and that canyon is my nervous system. It is thirty years of wiring that made me feel that the old pattern felt like safety.
The to-do list isn’t just a tool. It’s a security blanket. Crossing things off doesn’t feel productive. It feels like survival. If you’ve been tuning in to this show and nodding along, or if you’ve been thinking, “I should slow down a little. Maybe I should stop optimizing everything,” I want you to know, as the guy sitting here telling you this in his apartment surrounded by stuff and fighting the urge to optimize his way out of life, that it’s hard. It’s not philosophically hard.
I solved that a long time ago. It’s emotionally hard, even when you know it’s right, and even when you’ve built a series of episodes and chapters of books about it. If you’re wondering what happened to that plastic plant, the fiddle fig has been donated to a friend who is excited about it. How about that? What am I going to do? I’m going to make some tea, put on a record, and relax.
If you’re wondering about that poem, The Purge, I want to close by reading it. “The Purge from a fevered prophet. It began with a virus. The voice cracked, then the illusions. Illness wasn’t a curse. It was an interruption. A reset. Goals, amputated. Then, the spores. A mirror staring into my site like it might confess. I saw my soul pop up. Selling myself, my gift, cheaply. Embarrassingly. Vomited, violently.”
“Not from nausea, but from clarity. Now, generosity. Disappear into the gift. Give my silence. Subtract a voice from the cacophony. What does a man become when he stops begging to be seen? A second purge. Later. Vomited, viciously. Bile rose surveying the space. Not from hidden clutter, but from the spell it cast. Scarcity. Redundancy. Fear disguised as preparation.”
Clearing Physical Clutter To Heal Panic
“A declaration to soon-to-be wreckage. ‘I made this mess. I need to clean it.’ Then louder, ‘This won’t be easy. Prove your worth and survive.’ Two days. Tossed. Given. Burned. Not just cleaned. Cleared. Every item removed took a piece of panic with it. Closet by closet, shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer. Tore open the dark and found a spine. What does a man become when divorced from possessions?” Thank you for reading, good solos. Cheers.
Important Links
- The Purge
- Solo Thoughts 19: A-Life vs. B-Life
- Solo – The Single Person’s Guide to a Remarkable Life on Apple Podcasts